BagehotBritain has fretted about decline before, but never like this

IT IS hard to look at British politics these days without worrying that this is a country in decline. In 1900 the British Empire covered two-thirds of the planet, the City of London reigned supreme, and Britain both imported and exported more than any other country. Today Britain is a shadow of its former self: inward-looking and anxiety-ridden, stagnant and expensive, split down the middle and fearful of the future.

You can take refuge in all the usual qualifications and circumnavigations. Britain’s decline is relative rather than absolute. The average citizen of today’s Little Britain is far richer than was the average citizen of the greatest empire the world has ever seen. Other advanced countries have suffered from years of slow growth. Science and medicine march on. But the evidence of decline is just too big and all-pervasive to ignore.

Britain’s core political institutions are in an advanced state of decay. In the past, great crises have thrown up great leaders who have risen above them: Lloyd George during the first world war and Winston Churchill during the second. Today Britain has a choice between a dutiful mediocrity in the form of Theresa May and a professional protester in the form of Jeremy Corbyn. A quarter of Britons say they would back a far-right party because the mainstream ones have let them down.

Relative decline is threatening to turn into absolute decline. Economic growth has been slow since 2015, despite low interest rates and a fall in the value of the pound. Productivity growth has been nugatory. Real wages have been falling for a decade. A growing proportion of the population is trapped in a cut-throat gig economy. The next generation fears that it will be worse off than the baby-boomers.

Public debate is marinated in despair. Much of it is about Brexit, of course. Remainers complain that Brexit is leading to “national suicide”, while Brexiteers claim that their dream is being “betrayed”. But there is also despair about almost every other aspect of national life, from Britain’s defence capabilities (“Belgium with nukes”, in the words of Lord Richards, a former head of the defence staff) to its economic potential. Consider two vignettes from think-tank land this week. On July 23rd Policy Exchange held a discussion about “Britain’s growth model”. Not one of the participants, including Lord Macpherson, a former permanent secretary of the Treasury, had anything very positive to say about it. The next day Tony Blair told the Resolution Foundation that one of the biggest changes he had seen since the financial crisis was a growing pessimism about the ability of government to change lives for the better.

This is not the first time that Britons have been gripped by worries about decline. In the 1890s they worried that America and Germany were replacing Britain as the workshop of the world. In the 1950s they worried that an old-fashioned establishment was strangling the forces of progress. The 1970s saw a particularly fierce debate, as the country was plagued by strikes and three-day weeks. Martin J. Wiener blamed the “decline of the industrial spirit”, Correlli Barnett the over-mighty welfare state and Keith Middlemas the power of interest groups.

But three things make today’s mood particularly toxic. The first is disappointment. For the past 40 years, Britain felt that it had put decline behind it. Margaret Thatcher slew the dragons identified by the “declinists”, and her successors extended and entrenched the new consensus, with Sir John Major’s “classless society”, Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia” and David Cameron’s “Notting Hill Toryism”. This was manna from heaven for Britain’s new elite, which could congratulate itself on being more progressive than the old one, while stuffing its pockets with gold. But the new consensus also suffered from mounting problems. There was the problem of one-off windfalls: selling off council houses was wonderful for the tenants and the Treasury, but left Britain short of social housing. There was the problem of regional balance, with a boom in financial services pouring money into the south-east as the north remained a shadow of its former self. The Thatcher-Blair consensus was eventually consumed by the twin fires of the financial crisis of 2008 and the Brexit vote of 2016.

Anger without answers

The second thing poisoning the mood is the failure of collective judgment in deciding to leave the European Union. Brexit was driven by a peculiar combination of despair (about the way that the old model had left so many people behind) and optimism (that by freeing itself from the EU Britain would be able to reignite its growth engine). The despair may have been justified, but the optimism certainly wasn’t. Most of Britain’s problems are internally generated, and there is nothing about membership of the EU that prevents British entrepreneurs from trading with rest of the world—indeed, the EU has just signed a trade deal Japan and agreed to work towards lower trade barriers with America. Most economists predict that any version of Brexit will depress Britain’s growth rate. If Britain leaves without any deal, the consequences could be catastrophic. Dominic Raab, the new Brexit secretary, is drawing up contingency plans to stockpile medicine and food, and put electricity generators on barges in the Irish Sea.

The third problem is the law of compounded error. Bad policies may well feed people’s appetites for madder music and stronger wine. The Brexit debacle has already injected the poisonous charge of betrayal into the heart of politics. Brexiteers talk about Tory quislings and “Theresa the traitor”. It may well provide Mr Corbyn with an opportunity to win an election and implement a policy of nationalising key industries and unleashing his friends in the trade-union movement. Mr Blair argues that politics at the moment is about either riding the anger or finding the answer. The trouble is that fresh answers are getting harder to find—and the anger is mounting by the day.

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